“Marlin” is an open-standard, content-sharing technology platform created by the Marlin Developer Community. Marlin provides a Digital Rights Management platform in which access control technologies are provided which may be used in devices and computer programs. By means of licensing and encryption, content providers, publishers and/or copyright holders may protect the distributed content according to the Marlin standard. The main document of the standard is “Marlin-Core System Specification”, created by the Marlin Engineering Group and distributed by the Marlin Community.
Devices that support the Marlin standard are able to download the content by means of Marlin technology from a content provider if the user of the device has an account at the content provider. If the license of the downloaded content allows playing of the content, and if the device has the decryption key, the Marlin device may play the content to the user of the device.
The Marlin standard introduces the concept of a Marlin domain. A Marlin domain is a group of Marlin devices which share a set of protected content. All devices in the Marlin domain have the same access rights to the content of the domain. Obtained Marlin content, together with a license and a decryption key, is bound to the domain and not to individual devices.
In a Marlin domain, one of the devices is the domain manager. The domain manager controls the domain by binding new devices to the domain or releasing the binding between the domain and devices that are bound to the domain. Content providers trust the domain manager and demand that the domain manager prevents misuse, for example, by limiting the number of devices bound to the domain. Devices of a Marlin domain are connected to a shared network, or they share the network on a regular basis. For example, a user may have a home network to which most of his digital devices are permanently connected. One of the devices is the domain manager, preferably a permanently connected device. The user may have portable digital devices as well, which are connected to the network when the devices are in the home. The portable devices obtain the content, the licenses and the decryption keys when they are connected to the home network. If the portable devices are not connected to the home network, they are able to play the content because they obtained the licenses and decryption keys at an earlier stage.
If the device on which the active domain management software resides breaks down, the domain will be damaged and probably lost. The central domain management functions, such as binding devices, content, licenses and decryption keys to the domain are discontinued. Much information is lost, such as the bindings between the content and the domain, and/or the bindings between the devices and the domain. Today, the only solution for overcoming the loss of a domain manager is creating a new domain which has to become a copy of the original domain. This is a cumbersome task because bindings have to be restored manually and content providers have to be contacted once again to obtain permission to bind the content to the new domain. However, content providers are not willing to provide permission to bind the content to the new domain without receiving new payments for the content. It is almost impossible for a content provider to find out whether the old domain is really lost and to decide whether the new domain may be trusted or is fraudulent.